One of my Neglected Books guilty pleasures is the work of the prolific French novelist Maurice Dekobra. There was a time when Dekobra was among the best-known and most successful authors in the world. His books are said to have been translated into over seventy languages, and there was a time when no novelist came close to him as a precursor to Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann for American readers: our titan of titillation, if you will.
Dekobra’s books are like fresh garlicky potato chips: heavily seasoned and hard to resist, but not good to overconsume. From everything I’ve read, he was a man of monstrous ego. A man who, had the great Victor Hugo himself been around at the time, wouldn’t have hesitated to tell le maître des Les misérables to step aside as he paraded down the Champs-Élysées.
Dekobra’s egotism enabled him to blithely ignore his own ignorance. Reality and research were for the timid and unimaginative. The fact that he knew nothing about a subject never prevented him from making up his own facts. And if their foundations and construction seemed a bit jury-rigged and unstable, no matter: speed was what mattered most. As long as the reader kept turning the page, credibility took a back seat to pure forward narrative momentum.
In his 1929 novel Prince ou Pitre, published in English as Prince or Clown, for example, he invents an entire Balkan country, Phrygia, its language and culture. The Phrygians, for example, consume massive amounts of yarka, their national drink. Yarka, Dekobra informs us “made from distilled tomatoes and geranium leaves.” Geranium leaves are, in fact, edible and have been used to season dishes, supposedly; but distilled tomatoes? (The answer turns out to be yes, according to drinks website SevenFiftyDaily (“The Arrival of Tomato-based Spirits: European distillers are betting on Americans’ fondness for the nightshade with a new crop of liquors”) — so get your yarka franchise going today!)
Then there is the Phrygian language, which is capable of expressing things hitherto unthought and unfelt:
“Afafna!”
“Afafna?”
“That means in Phrygian, ‘By the body of my mother, I am overcome with zodiacal emotion.'”
Dekobra presents us with other bits of Phrygian: Tchik zaga houm-houm crakoi (“I’m feeling better” — I think); Zurbe Barigoul! (um .. sorry, not a clue); Djouk! (you can probably figure this one out yourself). (I must omit Kayout Kagda, as that would be a spoiler.) He also offers us a remedy for accidental poisoning: “Give her a spoonful of milk every two hours, a cup of cod liver oil, boric acid and gum-arabic.” (OK, admittedly this is probably what the finest GP in Paris would have prescribed … in 1729.)
Not surprisingly, Dekobra also had a high opinion of his high opinions. American and English newspapers loved to offer their readers his grand pronouncements on everything from love and marriage to food. And especially, women. He was, after all, “The Man Who KNOWS Women.”
Dekobra would argue that his ideas were grounded in careful and objective observation. When he visited in New York in January 1930, for example, he told reporters that he had come to conduct a study of American women:
Nevermind that upon debarking the week before, he felt confident in announcing that what American women needed was a good shaking:
By the time he’d ended his American tour, he was ready to set down his conclusiong about American women and American romance in algebraic precision:
Ten years later, as a refugee from occupied France, he predicted with striking inaccuracy the economic landscape of the postwar world:
When Dekobra turned fifty, he thought it was time to offer the world a larger piece of his mind. His autobiography, published in English as Written with Lipstick, is part memoir, part stories polished to perfection at countless dinner parties and rounds of drinks with friends — always showing Dekobra to his best advantage — and part pontifications as solemn and authoritative as any declared from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome. These last are easy to spot in the book: they’re always in numbered lists. There are, for example, four key failings of English women:
- They do not understand how to choose their dresses — above all, to choose colours — too much apple green and red geranium.
- They marry without careful consideration — before they know whether the man is suitable.
- They talk too much about their household affairs.
- They are too fond of bridge.
At the end of his chapter on “The Adventuress” (“chief character in tens of thousands of novels in every language under the sun”), he provides us with his “Articles of Association for Adventuresses” — or, “Ten Commandments for Love’s Highwaywomen”:
- Choose an original name — Thea, Belkis, or Mareva.
- Confide to men under strict secrecy that you are the niece of a revolutionary executed in prison, or the natural daughter of a Balkan king [from Phrygia, for example].
- Although you may have taken you M.A. at Oxford, speak English with a Russian accent, slightly flavoured with Bulgarian and just a suspicion of Hungarian.
- Have a favourite flower — a red lily or a Brazilian cowslip — that you won the first time you were kissed on the lips by a Cossack general at the age of sixteen.
- Introduce anecdotes into your conversation. Remark casually, for example: “‘In summer it is warmer than in winter,’ as the great Lao-Tze has said.”
- Always live at a hotel. An adventuress has no use for a kitchenette.
- Wear an antique ring on your little finger — one that used to contain deadly poison and was used by the Florentines in the days of Lucretia Borgia.
- If you happen to be spending a few days at Margate [surely Dekobra didn’t write Margate in his French original], say to the man who is paying you attention, “My dear, I have just arrived from Stamboul.”
- Procure a number of leading Continental hotel labels and stick them on your new luggage. An adventuress who does not travel is like a panther without teeth.
- An adventuress does not eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. She takes snails on toast, six olives, half a pound of caviare, and an aspirin tablet in a glass of absinthe.
When he returned to France after the war, Maurice Dekobra continued to publish several novels a year into the 1960s, but hardly any of these were translated and published in English. To readers now accustomed to fug, Lolita, and Playboy, Dekobra’s brand of footsies-as-sex seemed as outdated as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Which is a bit of a shame, as Dekobra’s postwar novels were, according to Claude Duneton, precursors to Frédéric Dard’s fast, furieux, and funny San Antonio novels.
However, by the time Philippe Collas’ biography, Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes, was published in 2002, most of Dekobra’s work had falled out of print and, even for French readers, he was an unknown. Melville House reissued his single biggest bestseller, The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, as part of its Neversink Library in 2012, but that appears to be the only one of his books currently available in English.
Dekobra was hugely successful — successful not just in his native France but among readers all over the world. He came up with his pen-name after seeing a snake-charmer’s act and he was something of a snake-charmer himself. His material was exotic, risky (or risqué and often both), quick-paced, and rarely more than an evening or two’s read. In a way, he made the same kind of appeal to wannabe sophisticates as Esquire later in the 1930s and Playboy in 1960s. You can see how Dekobra himself played this charade in his preface to the English edition of 
